THE VARIETIES OF BASEBALL EXPERIENCE

THE PROFESSOR OF BASEBALL: Can the master of statistics help the Red Sox beat the Yankees? (BEN MCGRATH, 2003-07-07, The New Yorker)

The Boston Red Sox really want to beat the Yankees. The team's president and C.E.O., Larry Lucchino, has declared the Yanks an "evil empire," and the principal owner, John Henry, speaks of being "destined to knock off Goliath." Last winter, after a season in which the Sox won ninety-three games-but nonetheless fell short of New York for the seventh straight year-Boston installed a new general manager and replaced more than forty per cent of its roster. Perhaps the club's most significant personnel move was the signing, to a one-year contract, of a big, lumbering fifty-three-year-old right-hander from Kansas (six feet four, and well over two hundred pounds) who spends far more time on the Little League diamond, where he keeps the stats, than at any big-league ballpark. He is Bill James, a former boiler-room attendant who, almost thirty years ago, set out to debunk the conventional wisdom proffered by television and radio commentators-"baseball's Kilimanjaro of repeated legend and legerdemain," as he called it-by using statistical evidence. [...]

James wrote that he wanted to approach the subject of baseball "with the same kind of intellectual rigor and discipline that is routinely applied, by scientists great and poor, to trying to unravel the mysteries of the universe, of society, of the human mind, or of the price of burlap in Des Moines." His books proceeded simply, directly, empirically. He responded to every new statement or unearthed fact with a dozen questions: If this is true, then what must also be true? What are the conditions under which it might not be true? And, if it is true, so what-why should we care? What does it all mean? Reading Bill James was like taking an advanced course in extemporaneous-debating technique. The prose was colloquial-"manneristically unmannered," the writer Veronica Geng called it-and full of non-baseball analogies ("The Astros are to baseball what jazz is to music"; "The way that managers have tested the limits of starting pitchers for the last century is quite a bit like the way they used to test for witches, by pond dunking"). Each essay or chapter was clearly outlined, and rife with italics-James's effort to create what he called "a lighted pathway between the question and the answer." He could write descriptively, such as when he addressed Pete Rose's late-career style: "the mad dash to first which has slowed to a furious waddle, the slight, tense quickening of his practice strokes at a key moment of the game, which passes sotto voce a sense of urgency to the dugout behind him, a sense of danger to the one across the way." And he was almost always funny, if a little cruel. In 1979, James wrote that Art Howe (the current manager of the Mets) "pivoted on the double play almost as well as Bobby Doerr. Doerr was one of the greatest pivot men ever, but he is now sixty-one years old, and he gave up the game some years ago, when he began to pivot like Art Howe."

But what set the writing apart-and put the Abstract on the Times' best-seller list-was the accessibility of the logic, the insistence on eliminating biases and ignoring illusions, the practical tone. James's approach seemed distinctly American, descended from the nineteenth-century pragmatist tradition exemplified by his namesake, the philosopher William James. Our James brought barstool argument to the page, and enforced a rigid sobriety. He set forth rational, elaborate methods for evaluating greatness, for example, and when he released his "Historical Baseball Abstract," in 1985, he established a new pecking order for the celebrated baseball players of our time. (Sorry, Catfish Hunter. Step on up, Bobby Grich!) More important, however, James treated his readers to an egghead's theory of winning baseball, in which outs-the only finite resource-are to be avoided at all costs, and walks (which are outproof) are considered more than just acceptable. Walks are admirable, and on-base percentage, not batting average, is the bedrock of a productive offense.

Baseball insiders-people who played and coached baseball every day-had a tendency to view outs as a necessary by-product of scoring runs. Experience showed them that a sacrifice bunt, properly executed, could lead to a game-tying base hit. They could see it right in front of them. They also remembered instances when the count was three-and-oh and a wanna-be hero, rather than take the walk, delivered a bloop single on a junk pitch, driving the go-ahead run home from second. What they couldn't see from the dugout-but what James tended to "see" without watching at all, from the boiler room, even-were the things that didn't happen, or that might have happened, but for the bunt, or for the lunge at a pitch outside the strike zone: the rallies that could put the game out of reach if you'd let the batters hit away instead of handing your opponents an out in the service of a lone score; the batters who accepted a walk, and then came around themselves to score, without risking the lazy fly out that was perhaps five times as likely as the lucky Texas leaguer. [...]

Theo Epstein, the new Red Sox G.M., was a fourth grader at Brookline Elementary School in Brookline, Massachusetts, when he discovered James, in 1984. "I remember reading the Abstract and thinking, God, after reading one book I've changed the way I look at the game on the field," he said the other day, while watching batting practice at Fenway Park. "I never thought that could happen from reading a book."

Holy cow! Not only a great profile but even an accidentally appropriate use of the David and Goliath analogy, with this David utilizing the technological superiority that should make him the favorite to win. Unfortunately, even though the Red Sox are assembled with more coherence and efficiency, the Yankees have an even greater weapon called cash money with which they'll just buy whatever they need to stay ahead in the arms race. They truly are the Evil Empire. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 20, 2003 1:37 PM